Peter Buck (born December 6, 1956 in Oakland, California) is the guitarist and co-founder, along with Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry, of the seminal 1980s college rock band R.E.M.. After spending time in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Buck family moved to Athens, Georgia, where Peter eventually worked at the popular Athens record store Wuxtry in which he met Michael Stipe.

Buck currently lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Stephanie Dorgan. This is notable considering the remainder of R.E.M. (Mike Mills and Michael Stipe) live in Athens, Georgia. They have twin girls, Zelda and Zoe.

Buck made contributions to several Eels albums.

Bucks's style of guitar playing has often said to be distinctive. He makes wide use of open chords and open strings to create simplistic yet memorable pop melodies. His strumming seems to many to be quite emotive; the NME described his more uplifting songs as "cavelier jangle." However, in more recent R.E.M. releases his guitar has been noticably less prominent, often turned down very low into the mix and drowned out by the band's increasing use of synths.

The year 2002 was to prove a troublesome one for Peter. On the 21st of April, whilst onboard a transatlantic flight from Seattle to London (where he was due to play a concert at Trafalgar Square) Buck was alleged to have created quite a disturbance. Some of the bizarre behaviour said to be exhibited by him on the flight included shoving a CD into a drinks trolley, thinking it was a CD player, tearing up the 'yellow card' warning notice handed to him by the flight crew, claiming "I am REM and I can make up a story hat I was assaulted" and being involved in a struggle over a yoghurt pot with two stewards, which resulted in the exploding of the pot. Buck's actions led to two charges of common assault (on the stewards), one charge of being drunk whilst on a plane and one charge of damaging British Airways cutlery. After a trial in West London, which included testimony from none other than Bono, Buck was cleared on the grounds of non-insane automatism . Buck's defence claimed that the small amount of wine he had drunk had reacted adversely with the brand of sleeping pill he was taking and rendered him unable to control his actions. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued that he was simply intoxicated from the supposed 15 refils of wine he had consumed.

External links

• Peter Buck Bio